Wow, we had a bit of a wind storm last night. 133 MPH winds in the mountains, 114 MPH gusts recorded at the coast, and gusts in the 80 MPH range in the valley. Living in the valley, we get very few such wintry days and you can tell, by looking at the number of downed trees around the neighborhood.
So how’d we fare. Not bad. The house was fine — power was only out off and on most of the night but I have a laptop and a direct Ethernet connection to our local station so I was able to work as long as I wanted. The furnace stopped working for some reason — I think it got debris in the flue — had someone come over and clean it out and its working again. However, we didn’t escape completely. We have some shade trees in the back, and these didn’t escape unharmed. These trees are hawthorn trees — pretty good size. Well, one of those 80 MPH gusts just snapped some of those trees like twigs. Here’s a picture:
We lost the tops of three trees. Oh, and if you look to the left, you’ll see that big best of a white thing. That’s one of those RV covers — kindof a temporary garage. The thing weight like 300 lbs and I seen it actually fly into our backyard. I spent about a 1/2 hour last night pulling off the canvas and moving it from the middle of my yard (where it was looking to fly again) to against the fence so it wouldn’t fly away again. Anyway, I’ll be spending some time chainsawing the trees the next few days and cleaning up — but overall — we were very fortunate. Here are a couple of other pictures.
–TR